Matthew's Blog
February’s Most Important Blog
The most important blog I wrote in February 2022 is The Personal Data Big Healthcare Wants From Job Applicants. We seriously underestimate how much corporations—including healthcare corporations—see us as data sources. We also underestimate their unshakable belief...
Ikigai, Curiosity, and The Nose
I recently wanted a documentary called Nose which is about the perfumer for Christian Dior, Francois Demachy. He is interesting on several levels, but the quality I found most remarkable was his sense of curiosity. Despite being at the top of his field, he is curious...
EHRs, Deidentification, and Informed Consent
I recently read a solid research article about healthcare bias called Examination of Stigmatizing Language in the Electronic Health Record published in JAMA Network Open. The article concluded that "findings suggest that stigmatizing language appears in patients’ EHR...
Cats, Vets, Hip Replacements, and Fear of the Unknown
My two-year-old cat, Roo, went to the vet for his yearly checkup. Soon, I will get a hip replacement. From Roo’s perspective (and perhaps from my family’s perspective, as Roo is one-third of our family!), the vet visit was the more important event. Fear of the unknown...
Professionals: Avoid Tweet-storms at All Costs
Storms, although often predictable at the macro-level, have an element of randomness that often causes significant chaos and destruction at the human level. Knowing “lots of bad stuff is going to happen” is not the same as saying what specific bad things will happen,...
On Wonder: Propofol, Consciousness and Death
I am scheduled for a hip replacement, a surgery in which I will receive propofol as my general anesthetic. I find propofol—and all general anesthetics—are interesting at a practical, scientific, and medical level. They are a miracle of modern medicine, and it is hard...
Discussing The Relationship Between Obesity and Health
Here’s my take on the controversy and debate surrounding the relationship between obesity and health. If opponents first agree upon and definition of obesity and a definition of health, then any debate or controversy about the obesity/health relationship (or lack...
Being a Patient
Being a patient with a significant medical problem (or problems) is something new for me. For the majority of my life, I haven't needed to engage with the healthcare system—but time waits for no man, and some decline in health is inevitable. It's certainly not much...
Science: Humanity’s Greatest Intellectual Achievement?
In his book, The Frontiers of Knowledge: What We Now Know about Science, History and the Mind, the philosopher A.C. Grayling makes the claim “in plain sober truth, without overstatement, science is humanity’s greatest intellectual achievement.” This may well be true;...